Our plant business was poisoned four years ago. Here’s what happened next

I’ve been waiting 4 years and 19 days to write this post.

That’s the day when every plant in our nursery was poisoned. Two weeks later, 500,000 plants were dead. Our business should have died too. This is a tale of survival and some valuable lessons learnt along the way.

For context in this story, I’m one part of Plants in a Box – an e-commerce store that sells plants across Australia and I started this business with my family and wife almost 10 years ago. My daily focus is on Ply and our new product Outlign. Credit goes to my partner Ella Prince and folks who are the operations team at Plants.

This story starts at the end of 2019.

One December morning we noticed that our plants were dry and wilting. Thinking they needed more water, we ran our sprinkler system. Little did we know, our water source had been poisoned with a product called Grazon Extra. Over the next few days, the plants wilted, yellowed and started the process of irreversible decay. For legal reasons, I won’t go into the detail of how these plants were destroyed, other than to say it came from a source outside our property.

This happened at a time when our business was growing rapidly (98% year-on-year growth) and we had that lovely bit of momentum every small business strives for. After a six-year slog of putting in ridiculous effort, facing ruin was pretty hard to take. We all worked through that week in a state of disbelief. Nobody saw this end coming and it seemed improbable we could resurrect what we had built.

Know when to ask for help

I think most small business people are cut from the same cloth. Independent, with a can-do attitude and an allergy to asking for help.

We faced a massive clean-up task to throw out all of our inventory. With our team, it would have been a three-week job. Instead, we put out the call the friends and family; 66 people showed up with gloves, wheelbarrows, generators, food and drinks. As each person turned up that morning to help us out, I blinked back tears of gratitude — too embarrassed to show how I felt on the inside.

To those people who turned up, thank you — you saved a business.

A problem shared is a problem halved

When the poisoning happened we didn’t want anyone to know about it. Mostly because we felt that it could cause us reputation damage and customers might not shop with us again. But slowly we changed our stance and we started reaching out to other plant nurseries to let them know what happened. Pretty soon we had incredibly generous offers to supply us back with plants on a ‘pay us when you can basis’. Horticulture is a pretty slow-moving industry, but I love how growers still band together to help each other in times of crisis.

The second major blow came about two months after the poisoning. The insurer of the responsible party came to visit our property to get the story straight and make an assessment of our claim for lost inventory.

We were flatly denied and informed that there was no evidence of wrongdoing.

This meant two things:

1. We couldn’t pay for the stock that other growers had sent us and that pushed us towards insolvent trading; and
2. It would now mean that we’d have to get tangled in a legal process, which we knew would cost our business a lot of money.

When all other options are exhausted, you must go feral

We did everything in our power to avoid a legal fight (that’s a story for another day).

A little small business against an insurance behemoth with unlimited money. That’s not a good bet to take.

But what we lost was a significant amount of money and a terrible interruption to our business. Why should we lay down and capitulate? Why should another’s stupid actions ruin what had been so tirelessly worked for? And what about the people that worked for us, why should they lose the jobs they loved?

I believe we’ve all got a bit of feral in us but we rarely have to reach for it. It’s reserved within us for times like this. And at this point, against advice from others, we decided to take the insurer to court.

F**k em. Let’s go.

Those who have the time and money usually win legal battles

This is part of the movie where the montage starts and the passage of time goes really fast. But I can tell you going through a legal matter like this over four years is one of the most brutal and consuming things I’ve been through.

Not only will it cost you everything you have in the bank (and more), but it will dominate your thoughts and take you away from running your business. In my parents’ case, it cost them their health.

This was life and death for us, but this was sport for the insurance company. And trust me when I say, they have every delaying and dirty tactic ever written into a playbook and they have no issues in stringing you out, softening you up, ignoring you and pulverising you into an anxiety-ridden state.

We need some serious change in our legal system to deal with huge power imbalances when it comes to David and Goliath battles.

In case you are interested, the cost of justice was $616,085.17.

It’s immoral and obscene.

I can assure you we didn’t just have this amount sloshing around in the bank account. Somehow we cobbled this amount together from a small amount of COVID trading profits, personal savings, taking out loans and selling a house.

There needs to be a fast-track process that deals with situations like ours that commits an insurance company to a six-month legal timetable — pleadings, mediation and a hearing date. Or maybe there’s another way? I’d love to hear some thoughts about changes because the current system is a disgrace.

How many businesses have gone under fighting insurers? How many have walked away because they don’t have the financial capacity to fight?

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How it all ends

Tuesday was settlement day. We won.

Up against an insurer with hulk-like legal muscle, we eventually made them shift from ‘you don’t have a claim’ to ‘here’s a little bit of money, go away’, to a decent chunk of change.

Was it the entire amount we were entitled to? No. But everything in life is a compromise and we fought well to get what we got. And that’s enough.

There’s so much more to this story and I might do a follow-up post but given you are reading this on LinkedIn, you’ll most likely need to get back to work, so I’ll wrap it up!

It’s time to put money back into what is a great little Aussie business and give it every opportunity to grow into the brand we believe it can be.

At Plants in a Box, our tagline is ‘Feels good to grow’. Never has that felt more appropriate.

I want to say a huge thanks to Ella Prince, and John and Debbie Prince for keeping our business alive.

For anyone out there who wants to show some support as we get moving again, please share this story or send our website to your friends.

Thanks for your support!

This article was first published on LinkedIn.